The Nobel awards being announced next week cover the range of human endeavor, from peacemaking to scientific discovery to literature, yet share a tradition of mystery and wild speculation about who might win.

"I've been surprised almost every time," Stein Toennesson, director of the International Peace Research Institute-Oslo, told The Associated Press on Friday.

Toennesson's predictions about possible winners strongly influence media coverage and odds set by bookmakers, even though he has no inside information. Each year he bravely publishes a widely cited, well-reasoned, well-founded and - he admits - usually wrong set of surmises.

This year, with world attention fixed on global warming, Toennesson said giving a joint prize to Gore, the former U.S. vice president, and Inuit environmental activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Canada could be an appealing choice for the prize committee.

"It would have to do with climate change, and it would be a prize that included both a man and a woman," he said.

Another possibility would be to honor the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Toennesson said.

Others mentioned include Finnish peace mediator Martti Ahtisaari and activists like Lida Yusupova of Russia, Rebiya Kadeer in China and Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Do.

The peace award is announced in Oslo, while the other prizes - medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics - are announced in Stockholm. The prizes, established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, were first handed out in 1901.

Each award carries a cash prize of 10 million Swedish kronor, which this year is worth about $1.54 million.

The Swedish and Norwegian committees separately deciding the awards work in deep secret, refusing to even say who is nominated until the announcements, which begin Monday with the medicine prize in Stockholm.

"It's always fun if it comes as a surprise," said Hans Jornvall, secretary of the medicine prize committee. The final decision will be made Monday just before the announcement, he said.

For the literature award, British bookmaking firm Ladbrokes has Italian writer Claudio Magris Magris as the leading contender, ahead of Australian poet Les Murray. American novelist Philip Roth, whose name comes up in Nobel speculation every year, is third.

"I would like to see the prize go to an American this year. There are at least two who really deserve it: Cormac McCarthy, who got the Pulitzer Prize for his latest novel 'The Road,' and Philip Roth," said Jonas Axelsson at the Bonnier publishing house in Stockholm.